All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [228]
“Fog!” the Boss exclaimed, and came up out of the chair. “Fog! Telephone him–you telephone him–tell him to come on, fog or no fog.”
“A plane can’t fly in fog,” Adam said.
“Telephone him–that boy in there–that boy in there–my boy–” The voice didn’t trail off. It simply stopped with a sound like something of great weight grinding to a stop, and the Boss stared at Adam Stanton with resentment and a profound accusation.
“Dr. Burnham will come when it is possible,” Adam said coldly. Then after a moment in which he met the resentment and accusation, he said, “Governor, I think that it would be a good thing for you to lie down. To get some rest.”
“No,” the Boss said hoarsely, “no.”
“You can do no good by not lying down. You will only waste your strength. You can do no good.”
“Good,” the Boss said, “good,” and clenched his hands as though he had tried to grasp some substance which had faded at his touch and dissolved to air.
“I would advise it,” Adam said quietly, almost softly. Then he turned and inquiring glance upon Lucy.
She shook her head. “No, doctor,” she almost whispered. “I’ll wait. Too.”
Adam inclined his head in acceptance, and went out. I got up and followed him.
I caught up with Adam down the hall. “What is it like?” I asked.
“Bad.” he said.
“How bad?”
“He is unconscious and paralyzed,” Adam said. “His extremities are quite limp. The reflexes are quite gone. If you pick up his hand it is like jelly. The X-ray–we took a skull plate–shows a fracture and dislocation of the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae.”
“Where the hell is t?”
Adam reached out and laid a couple of fingers on the back of my neck. “There,” he said.
“You mean he’s got a broken neck?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that killed them.”
“It usually does,” he said. “Always if the fracture is a little higher.”
“Has he got a chance?”
“Yes.”
“To just live or to be all right?”
“To be all right. Or almost all right. Just a chance.”
“What are you going to do?”
He looked at me directly, and I saw that his own face didn’t look much different from the way it would have looked if somebody had kicked him in the head, too. It was white and drawn.
“It is a difficult decision,” he said. “I must think. I don’t want to talk about it now.”
So he turned from me, and squared his shoulders, and went off down the hall, over the polished composition floor, which glittered in the soft light like brown ice.
I went back to the room where Lucy Stark sat across from the Boss, in the midst of the chintz and potted plants and water colors. Now and then she would lift her gaze from her lap, where the hands were clasped together with the veins showing blue, and would look across the intervening distance into her husband’s face. He did not meet her gaze, but stared into the heatless illumination of the artificial logs on the hearth.
After one o’clock a nurse came down to the room with the message that the fog had cleared and that Dr. Burnham’s plane was on the way again. They would let us know as soon as it came in. Then she went away.
The Boss sat silent for a minute or two, then said to me, “Go down and call up the airport. Ask what the weather is like here. Tell ’em to tell Sugar-Boy I said for him to get here quick. Tell Murphy I said I meant quick. By God! By God–” And the oath was left suspended, directed at nothing.
I went down the corridor and down to the telephone booths on the first floor, to give that crazy message to Sugar-Boy and Murphy. Sugar-Boy would drive like hell anyway, and Murphy–he was the lieutenant in charge of the motorcycle escort–knew he wasn’t out there for fun. But I called the port, was told that the weather was lifting–a wind had sprung up–and left the message for Murphy.
When I stepped out of the booth, there was Sadie. She must have been hanging around in the lobby, probably sitting on one of the benches back in the shadow, for I hadn’t seen har when I entered.
“Why didn’t you say boo and give me real heart failure and finish the job?” I asked.
“How is it?” she demanded, seizing my coat sleeve.
“Bad. He broke his neck.”
Has he got any chance?